Tina Brown on Women, Leadership and Her Upcoming Summit

Tina Brown, Founder and CEO, Tina Brown Live Media/Women in the World opens The 2017 Women In The World Summit in New York City; 4/5/2017(Photo courtesy of Women In The World)

In this watershed moment we are in, with women courageously speaking their truths through #MeToo, stepping up to run for office in record numbers and becoming active in a multitude of ways, it seems that women’s voices are being heard more than ever before. Yet there are still so many important women’s stories that don’t make the headlines.

Tina Brown’s Women in the World Summit, now in its ninth year, offers a platform for those powerful individual stories to be told, bringing together strong female role models from all industries whose experiences illuminate the most pressing domestic and international issues.

The ninth annual Women of the World Summit is being held this week, April 12th-14th, at New York City’s Lincoln Center. The Summit will feature groundbreaking conversations from the #MeToo fallout, dark new trends in human trafficking, the battle for pay equity, the women transforming the restaurant business, how digital innovation is disrupting intimate relationships and more.

I had the chance to interview the Summit’s founder, Tina Brown—whose distinguished career includes being current president and CEO of Tina Brown Live Media, former editor of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and founder of The Daily Beast—to find out more about the Women in the World Summit, why she feels it’s so important to have women’s equity in leadership and what her call to action is for women everywhere.

Marianne Schnall:This feels like a very fertile moment that we’re in where there is this unprecedented awareness and engagement, particularly among women, who are stepping up in all kinds of ways. How do you see this moment that we are in for women?

Tina Brown: I think it’s a tipping point moment in every way. And the thing about Women in the World is we’ve been amplifying these issues since 2009 when we began. We were kind of lonely in that moment. Very early on we found it hard to get the sense of "this was a movement,” which is actually what I felt: that a global movement was beginning. What is exciting is that this movement has come full circle and we’re now seeing America galvanized by Trump, galvanized by #MeToo, actually pressing forward and getting very real indeed about ending discrimination against women.

There are a lot of issues that have been discussed for years and years, like pay equity or sexual harassment, but they haven’t had this pointed, purposeful, really amplified response that we’re getting now.

Equal pay is one thing where you’re seeing that women are just saying, “Enough! We’re really going to make this happen now.” We have the amazing Carrie Grace coming to the Summit who led the pay equity flurry recently at the BBC. They offered her a big raise for being China Bureau Chief and she said, “I don’t want the raise; I want equity with the male Bureau Chief,” because she was a very distinguished foreign correspondent. And when she found out that it wasn’t equity, it was just a raise, she just said “No thanks, not taking it. I’ll just go back to the newsroom and resign from the Bureau Chief.” She winds up being a great national hero for women in the gender equity issue; she testifies in the Parliament. Every BBC anchor came out to support her.

We’re seeing now a move toward making pay inequity illegal. In England now, companies are being required to talk about transparency in terms of pay. That has been happening in the U.S., but of course Trump rolled that back last year when he said companies were not expected, in fact, to reveal their gender makeup in terms of pay distribution. We’re seeing a huge amount of energy on this, and it’s really real

MS: You have been such an accomplished leader during your career, working across a variety of industries in different capacities. What are some of the most important leadership lessons that have served you?

TB: I had my own battles to get myself properly compensated, and I wrote about it in my book, The Vanity Fair Diaries. I turned the magazine around and turned it into a commercial juggernaut. And I discovered that I wasn’t being paid as much as the male editor at GQ. It took hiring a major agent lawyer to go in to actually get me a completely different pay structure where I was given a million dollar bonus for what I had accomplished.

So one of my feelings is that women really have to take stock of and seek advice on the issue of where they are in being compensated and how. One of the things we saw that Carrie Grace talks about at the BBC is the support of other women. Strength in numbers is incredibly important. Other women at BBC coming out on her behalf was a very important aspect. Women have to be supportive of one another. If a company is not doing something right for women, they need to be active and they need to be informed.

MS: I think now there is much more awareness about how underrepresented women are across all sectors—politics, business, media, finance—and the need for having that kind of equity. What do you think we need to do to get closer?

TB: One of the things that blows my mind is there are all these women stuck on the COO level, and there was recently a survey where you had to name a major female leader in tech, and the majority of the responders answered “Siri.” Siri! Which made me laugh and cry. Siri and Alexa were the two names that came up just because there aren’t many [women leaders in tech]. There are a ton of women stuck at that COO or CFO level, but they’re not making it to the top level. How do we change that? At this moment, it’s pushing, it’s really pushing.

MS: Why do you think it’s important—other than for just equality’s sake—that women have equal representation across industries?

TB: It’s really important because we need diversity of opinion and approach. Look at that cabinet picture from last night of Donald Trump discussing Syria with all those men—all white men, fifty-six and up. I’m thinking, “How can you be the ones determining the fate of America that looks so terribly different from you right now in its makeup? Why do we want to keep hearing your retro take on the world and where it should be going?”

I want to see diversity across the board—in political opinion, gender, race, age. It’s really important to have that or you’re going to make terrible mistakes. We’ve seen that companies that have women on the board statistically do better than the ones that don’t. It’s not just some heartstrings thing, like, “Oh, let’s make sure women are here just because it’s fair.” It makes better sense since women are half the world.

MS: Many of the sessions you have upcoming at the Summit, including the one Hillary Clinton is moderating, feature courageous women who have had to brave many forms of adversity and backlash when they raised their voice or advocated for a cause they are passionate about. What can we learn from them and what have you learned about facing those challenges as a woman yourself?

TB: I’m very, very excited. Having Hillary moderate is one of the ways we pay respect to brains. She is one of the best informed people in public life, frankly. What I wanted from her is to hear her expertise—as opposed to just badgering her about what happened in the election—actually ask her to show that expertise in talking to women who are similarly brilliant and well-informed.

One of the things I find frustrating when watching T.V. is the lack of the really brilliant women, academic, top journalist, and so on. In fact, you never hear from women who have a tremendous expertise. That’s what I feel is so often missing from public debate: women of great diversity and expertise. I think it’s very important to have that mix of expertise and age and diversity on all of those talking shows and opinion shows.

Women in the World really tries to expose every kind of woman on its stage—in terms of age, race, gender, everything. One of the things we try to do at the Summit is to pull together these global themes with what’s happening here in the news—to better enlighten people through the viewpoints of women who so rarely get heard. There’s an enormous space out there for the voices of women who you absolutely never hear from in news or media or anywhere particularly because nobody goes to them for comments.

MS: That’s one of the things I wanted to acknowledge and thank you for. There are plenty of well-known names on the roster of speakers, but there are also some speakers who are “unsung heroes.” Why did you decide to use your platform to uplift the voices of these women?

TB: Because no one else is really paying much attention to them, and I feel that their stories are just so inspiring. I mean, young women really need role models. Ultimately, young women need to be shown women of achievement, women of courage, women of stature, women of dignity who are doing things for the world.

We have Hillary Clinton and Sally Yates, and at the same time, we also want to show women like Madeleine Habib who is a sea captain rescuing refugees, and people like Topeka Sam, Founder and Executive Director of the Ladies of Hope Ministries who is trying to better the lives of incarcerated women. We need to tell the stories of women like Sunitha Krishnan, herself a survivor of sexual violence, who founded the largest sanctuary in India for the trafficked women and girls she rescues; Dr. Fozia Alvi, a Canadian doctor and volunteer who has been on the ground of the Rohingya genocide; Bushra Aldukhainah, an aid worker and journalist in Yemen—and these are only some of the amazing women on the frontlines of huge crises who are doing absolutely critical work to advance women’s rights and liberties.

Our ability to raise profiles and get great media spotlight can now be directed at some of the remarkable women like this who need our attention.

MS: The Summit spans so many different international issues and voices. Why is it important to see the global picture, and how do you view the status of women globally?

TB: To start, it’s unique that Women in the World does global issues. We are all interconnected, and women here need to know what women are facing in different countries.

I feel that the more we learn about the world, the more we understand ourselves. We should be reaching out to those global sisters and they should be seeing us in a way that isn’t simply through the prism of what Donald Trump has been doing.

MS: What is your call to action for women today?

TB: My call to action is stay focused and be tenacious. Women have to be tenacious and tough and have a thick skin. They should spend their time focusing on fixing the big things, such as pay inequity, inclusion in decision-making and getting themselves to the top, as opposed to near the top. Also fixing the issue that holds women back, which is primarily childcare. That’s the reason women can’t “lean in,” because they have to go pick up their children at soccer practice. Ultimately, fixing childcare for women is one of the major things, and we’re not hearing about that really.

The 2018 Women in the World Summit will take place from April 12-14, 2018 at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center. For access to the full agenda and this year’s live stream, visit www.womenintheworld.com.

Marianne Schnall is a widely-published interviewer and journalist and author of What Will It Take to Make a Woman President? Conversations About Women, Leadership & Power. She is also the founder and Executive Director of feminist.com and co-founder of What Will It Take Movements, a media, collaboration, learning, event and social engagement platform that inspires, connects, educates and engages women everywhere to advance in all levels of leadership and take action.

I am the founder of What Will It Take Movements (WhatWillItTake.com), a media, collaboration, learning, event and social engagement platform that inspires, connects, educates and engages women everywhere to advance in all levels of leadership and take action. I am also a wid...